Town Square

Modern nomads

<I>Exhibit shows Tuareg people of West Africa holding onto traditions, but moving with the times</I><BR>A camel and a 4x4 truck. Cantor Arts Center director Thomas Seligman likes to use this improbable pair to illustrate the world of the Tuareg people of West Africa. <B>Photos by Marjan Sadoughi/Palo Alto Weekly.</B>

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Posted by Helene E. Hagan
a resident of Southgate
on Jun 9, 2007 at 9:24 pm

Ms Rebecca Wallace:

The Koumama family of Agadez brought by Dr. Seligman to the Stanford University Exhibit, The Art of Being Tuareg, are representatives of a special social category of artisans among the Tuareg people. They were and are, by tradition, in the service of those of a higher rank, called Free or Noble Men, Imazighen. The essential Tuareg culture is an Amazigh culture, and part of a large group of over thirty million Berber and Tamashek speakers in Africa.

While Imazighen were indeed the noble warriors of the Sahara Desert and led caravans across the sands, the "inadans" (smiths, and their wives, leather-workers) were a group of crafts people of a different ethnicity and origins. It is therefore somewhat of a distortion to display our traditional Amazigh culture which is extremely rich in ritual, oral lore, music, and traditions, through an acculturated family of "inadans" whose origins are non-Amazigh. The story told is a fragmentary one: the part does not represent the whole.

The Art of Being Tuareg Exhibit pretends to portray Tuareg life, but it falls very short of the desired goal, because of the limitations imposed by a very complex social context in which artisans are but a fragment of a cultural group which is originally not their own but in which they have nonetheless been fully accepted and integrated. They cannot pretend, however, to have become the only culture bearers of that culture. To do so or to use an African family with the goal of portraying an entire live Amazigh culture, is to falsify the cultural context from which they come.

The members of this family may be ignorant of the ancient traditions and symbolism, but they did not know them to begin with. Their acculturation, now that they have moved away from the nomadic group they served to enter the service of Europeans and Americans who offer larger profits and more business, and that they moved to an urban environment which cuts them off from the real issue of Amazigh survival per/se, is not necessarily the acculturation of the real Tuareg nomads who survive in the desert.

It would be the duty of the Museum Curator, Dr. Seligman, to make this distinction clear and unequivocal in all the publicity surrounding the Exhibit, but in advertising the Exhibit, Dr. Seligman has often regrettably failed to do so.

Posted by Paul Rankin
a resident of Old Palo Alto
on Jun 11, 2007 at 9:18 am

TUAREG TALES IN TIMBUKTU:
An initiative for nurturing the oral heritage of nomadic cultures.

This wonderful exhibition about the Tuareg finding their place in the modern world should remind us that artefacts in a museum are but tangible tokens to the intangible: in this case a rich living oral culture of ancient artistry, knowledge, wisdom, poetry, music and stories. The stories of the Tuareg, like those of other minority cultures, encapsulate different ways of viewing the world and behaving, ways of living in harmony with the environment and fostering biodiversity that are fast vanishing.

We would like to bring to your attention a new non-profit, 'Living Cultural Storybases' which will be working with Tuareg communities later this year.
This community-empowerment work is a part of a global venture against the accelerating disappearance of cultural diversity being incubated in California, supported by the Christensen Fund.

The retelling of traditional and personal stories is vital for cultural transmission, group solidarity, ethnic identity and evaluation of change. We would like your support to create living networks of stories and songs for minority communities to share, celebrate and re-interpret their cultural knowledge, i.e. self-empowering narratives.

Our engagement with Tuareg nomads aims to show how new, more appropriate digital technologies can provide information and communication even in remote deserts and across countries. This can strengthen Tuareg dialogue across the generations, between scattered nomadic groups and with their urban diaspora in their own language, Tamasheq.

We are looking for skilled volunteers who would like to get involved and sponsors for our 501c(3) organization. Do contact us!
email: coordinator@storybases.org
website: Web Link

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